I went back to graduate school because I wanted to avoid being a professional, to try to piece together a life that would let me avoid the tenure race and full-time teaching.

Bulgaria is a fascinating, beautiful, difficult country, and I fell in love with it.

I do think that the sense of being opposed to the present moment, that sense of the rub of history, invigorates the writing I find most exciting, and maybe precisely in being equally allegiant to an inward fineness of sensibility and an outward-facing rigor of protest or critique.

I went back to graduate school because I wanted to avoid being a professional, to try to piece together a life that would let me avoid the tenure race and full-time teaching.

My life has had a lot of fits and starts: before I studied literature at all I was a musician, and began undergrad as a conservatory student. I started studying literature in my third year of college, when I took a poetry course with James Longenbach that was pretty extraordinary. It changed my life.

History is never invisible, finally, though some people seem to work very hard to be willfully blind.

I think history is only ever invisible when it abets your sense of self, your desires, your ambitions, when it carries your life along in a kind of frictionless way.